Two weeks ago I received an email from a geologist with the USGS, in part it read..."...if you can prove altitude clustering is non-stratigraphic, trying to keep the story in the second half of thr pleistocene opens a big can of worms, because the implications for subaerial fluvial geomorphology are fairly sweeping. ( Oh Baby, talk dirt to me, USGS; Say " subaerial fluvial geomorphology" for the nice man, Junior.) the sentence above in blue, as well as the rest the email was, to me, clear, precise, and written with great economy. Geology, unlike other disciplines such as the "dark art of lawyering", has taken care in developing concise referents for the words in it's lexicon. To some extent if you know the words you pretty well know the science.
But Geology's careful love affair with words is not surprising, three-thirds of the geologists of the world spent two-thirds of the last century naming things and looking for oil, while every schoolboy who had ever worked a picture puzzle could see that South America fit snugly with Africa. But even after "Plate Tectonics" I think it best not to reinforce too many neural links to the words "plumes", "hot spots", or even "plates". It may be years before Geologists know precisely what they mean.
Sometimes though, Geology ignores important questions that interests me. For example the " Carolina Bays." While they are neither restricted only to the Carolinas nor are they bays, the origin of 500,000 elliptical northwest trending lakes is largely ignored by geologists and so left to free thinkers to explain. I am personally torn between the "Mammoth Wallow Hole" theory and the "Exploding Comet".
One odd theory (Thom 1970) combines...wind deflation with perched water tables and shore erosion at a ninty degree angle to the prevailing wind. Maybe Wordwind, AWAD's own prevailing wind from the Carolinas has an opinion or knows the answer.
